CCR213 | Critical Reflections on International Politics

This elective is designed as a standalone course to invoke curiosity among the students about international politics, following an interdisciplinary approach. The discipline is called International Relations based on the state-centric assumptions of inter-state affairs. Thus, calling it International Politics is a deliberate attempt at making the discipline more inclusive and creating a larger space for critical engagement with pertinent issues.

This course is crafted with an introduction to the discipline by familiarising the students with the bird’s eye view of the discipline’s mainstream approach. Moving forward, the course challenges these mainstream assumptions from critical/reflective perspectives and highlights the concerns of race, human rights, gender, drones, terrorism, refugees, representation and climate in international politics. While the discipline is riddled with Western-centric worldviews, the course attempts to expand its horizons. Unlike conventional IR courses, this course brings alternative discourses to the forefront of international politics. Every session, therefore, is designed for theme-based discussions on relevant IR concepts.

Pedagogically, methods such as lectures, Socratic discussions, seminar-style discussions, and flip classrooms will be employed. This will allow greater room for dialogic engagement and the development of a coherent set of ideas among the students with regard to international politics.

The course layout includes 10 sections in the following sequence-

Module 1- Unfolding the Discipline

• Introduction to the Mainstream IR (10 hours)

• Problematising the Mainstream Assumptions in IR (4 hours)

Module 2- Deciphering the ‘Other’ in International Politics

• Human Rights- Whose Rights? (4 hours)

• Gender in International Politics (8 hours)

• Rethinking Drones and Geopolitics (4 hours)

• Reimagining Violence and Terrorism (2 hours)

Module 3- Emerging Areas in International Politics

• Citizenship and Exclusion (2 hours)

• Aesthetics in International Politics (2 hours)

• Climate Politics (2 hours)

• AI and the World (2 hours)